[Memnoch]

DID YOU KNOW ?
==============

• Stuart Townsend was originally cast as Aragorn, but was replaced with Viggo Mortensen after four days of shooting due to creative differences.
• Ian Holm, who plays Bilbo Baggins, was the voice of Frodo Baggins in the classic BBC Radio adaptation of Lord of The Rings in the 1970s.
• New Zealand's army was cast as extras for large battle scenes in the film, but was forced to back out due to having to serve as peacekeepers in East Timor.
• Producer Tim Sanders left the project after principal photography had commenced.
• When the trailer was released on Internet on 7 April 2000, it was
  downloaded 1.6 million times in the first 24 hours.
• Elijah Wood donned hobbit-forming breeches and a flowing shirt and took to the hills for his LOTR audition tape. He even recruited buddy George Huang, writer and director of the Hollywood satire Swimming with Sharks (1994), to direct him.
• For high-tech tasks, a computer program called MASSIVE made armies of CG orcs, elves, and humans. These digital creations could 'think' and battle independently - identifying friend or foe - thanks to individual fields of vision. Jackson's team could click on one creature in a crowd scene of 20,000 and see through his "eyes". Different species even boast unique fighting styles.
• The hobbits needed to appear about three to four feet tall - tiny
  compared with the seven-foot Gandalf. This was often accomplished using forced perspective, placing McKellen consistently closer to the camera than Wood in order to trick the eye into thinking McKellen is towering.
• Viggo Mortensen lost a tooth while filming a fight sequence. He went to the dentist on his lunch break and had it patched up, and returned to the set that afternoon.
• Directors Cameo (Peter Jackson): As the belching peasant, outside the Prancing Pony Inn in Bree.
• Christopher Tolkien, son of the author of the Lord of the Rings,
  disowned his own son Simon Tolkien for supporting the making of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
• The nine members of the Fellowship got a small tattoo, the elvish symbol for '9' at a tattoo parlor in Wellington, New Zealand, to commemorate the experience of the movie. Ian McKellen won't tell where his tattoo is.
• More than 1,600 pairs of latex ears and feet were used during the shoot, each 'cooked' in a special oven running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There was no way of removing the feet at the end of the day without damaging them and so each pair could only be used once. The used feet were shredded to prevent a black market in stolen hobbit feet but apparently Dominic Monaghan (Merry) kept a pair.
• Christopher Lee reads the Lord of the Rings book once a year and is the only member of the entire cast and crew ever to have met Tolkien.
• Dominic Monaghan (Merry), wore a fat suit made of foam. He drank 3 litres of water a day so he would not dehydrate.